Patrick Elkins//Oh Rad Art House, What a Rad Art House Thou Art

Friday Friday Friday means it's
[Local! Music! Friday!]
Tell me...what is this Local Music Fridays?

Patrick Elkins: how do I start? I believe I met the man in the early days of Dumb and Ugly Club. Michael and I played a show in his attic. He was really awesome and very supportive. We got to play some other shows with him in Ypsi at the Elbow Room, which is where we scored one of his albums. So. Weird. So. Cool . From there, Pat just became a staple in the A2/Ypsi scene. I’d see him at Shaman Drum, he started an a-capella band with Aleise Barnett, he put on puppet shows at the dreamland and he played songs about suicide muffins. There is no one greater.

I wanted to post this song, a live recording of an ode to a house I once lived in, because it really gets back to a certain period of time in Ann Arbor. House shows and Co.op shows were ruling the school (Totally Awesome House, Rad Art, Lester and Black Elk were all putting on shows) and it was fun to be right in the middle of all that.

Rad Art house was started by the UofM Radical Art group (hilariously, their manifesto is still online here). While there was some movement in the house, year to year, a core group of kids stuck around for continuity’s sake, while a core amount of their furniture built up to massive proportions in the house’s dank mold-filled basement. I lived there for a year, with my boyfriend (and my recent ex-girlfriend, and my recent ex-girlfriend’s dog—AWKWARD) and rotating cast of seven other of our closest (or not closest) friends. For part of my tenure, two of my best friends (dating at the time) lived in the house. One of them (will go unnamed) attempted (with some success) to secretly grow magic mushrooms in our bathroom. Yes, it was that kind of house.

I believe that this recording is from Pat performing at the other best A2 houseshow venue, Totally Awesome House (which we sometimes called the Totally Awkward House, for the Awkward drunken conversations that could sometimes occur there). I believe I was at this show. I believe you can hear Aleise and Jason Voss singing in the crowd! In fact, of these last two tidbits, I am certain.



Oh Rad Art House, What a Rad Art House Thou Art.mp3

More about Patrick here.

There’s a lot of people in this world,
But not all of them are smart.
And here’s a lot of houses in the world,
But only one of them is The Rad Art.